PRESENTER BIOS AND TOPICS

Meaghan McKeown, How to Hit a Moving Target – Vulnerability Intelligence for 3rd Party Patching

Do you know what software applications need updating in your system today? Once you identify, how are you creating and deploying these patches in your system? With nearly 86% of vulnerabilities coming exclusively from 3rd party software applications, it’s more important than ever to patch everything in your environment. In this session we will go through how vulnerability intelligence can help you prioritize what patches are most important for your environment based on your security risks. Plus, we will demo how you can create and deploy third party patches through Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Center 2012.

Tommy Patterson, What’s New in Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure

Tommy’s action packed presentation and demo compiles many of the new details revealed during TechEd, MMS, and TechReady for all things new in Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure.

Tommy Patterson began the virtualization adventure during the launch of VMware’s ESX server’s initial release. At a time when most admins were only adopting virtualization as a lab-only solution, he pushed through the performance hurdles to quickly bring production applications to the environment. Since the early 2000s, he has spent most of his career in a consulting role providing assessments, engineering, planning, and implementation assistance to many members of the Fortune 500. Troubleshooting complicated scenarios, and incorporating best practices into customer’s production virtualization systems has been his passion for many years. Now he shares his knowledge of virtualization and cloud computing at Microsoft as an IT Pro in the Platform Evangelists division.

In this session, Chris explores the ways Cox utilizes the various toolsets within vCenter Operations in conjunction with Log Insight for troubleshooting and deeper problem analysis.

Chris is a lead systems administrator @ Cox Communications. His current favorite technologies revolve around virtualization, cloud computing architectures, and POWERshell. Also, a self-diagnosed technophile to top it all off.

In this session, Hal will talk about the value of logs and other machine data, particularly the things that AREN’T in the System Center GUI. We’ll go into a few different ways to collect this data. Once you have it all in one place, Hal will show you some of the cool stuff you can find in SCCM agent logs that might help you to solve some thorny issues in your environment. You’ll also learn how to use PowerShell or Splunk as the tools to collect and analyze log data.

Hal Rottenberg works as a Solution Architect for Splunk. His background is in Windows and VMware systems engineering, PowerShell automation, and big data analytics. Hal is a Microsoft PowerShell MVP, and is the co-host of the long-running PowerScripting Podcast. He enjoys speaking about technology at user groups and conventions when he’s not running his kids around to soccer practice. You can find him online as halr9000 everywhere that geeks hang out.

Scott Moss, SCOM 2012 MP Authoring 101 w/ Visio Tools

This session is an introduction for the IT professional on how to utilize the Visio Authoring tool to extend Operations Manager 2012 monitoring capability. Scott will walk through making a management pack as well as sealing it.

Scott is currently performing contract work for various agencies, focusing heavily on Operations Manager and integrating OpsMgr with other System Center products.